Thursday, December 21, 2006

When all is said and done and the Newbery is picked and a certain someone I know is able once more to read books made in nations other than her own, that same someone is going to have a lot of books on her hands. A lot. So what does one do with a lot of books?

Well, there's the option of donating them to school libraries that need them or to worthy causes. And on the slightly more flippant end of the spectrum, there's Book Crossing. It's like a catch and release program for literature. You register a book on the website and release it in a public space. Then, hopefully, someone else finds it, reads it, and releases it somewhere else. It's like when I was in nursery school and we tied messages to ends of balloons. Then everyone let go and hoped that someone would find the message and send us a postcard or something. Simpler times. When I was ten I heard that you should never release a balloon into the sky or a dolphin would come along and eat it and choke and die.

No dolphins, as far as my research indicates, have come along and eaten any of these books. Unless the books smelled like salmon or something. But then the books were probably just asking for it.

In any case, it's an option. For one or two titles it might be fun to "free". And as you can see by the recently released titles, many are in fact children's books.